Interconnection of electronic equipment located at a premises is commonly performed by coaxial cable meeting rigorous standards. Shielded coax cable allows interconnection in a local area network (LAN) covering more than 300 linear feet distance. This is because external radio frequency (RF) energy is not induced in shielded coax cable and because crosstalk energy between parallel cables is suppressed by the use of such cable.
Installing coax cable in a premises is costly and disruptive to the work being performed. In many cases, holes must be made in walls and/or floors and, possibly, an entire subflooring must be installed, to permit routing of coax cable. Once a particular cabling arrangement is established, it can be changed only with difficulty.
Most buildings have an extensive telephone wiring system already in place. It would be highly desirable to use these twisted-pair (TP), unshielded, wires to interconnect electronic equipment, such as computers, workstations, data entry terminals, and the like. Even in buildings being planned, it would be desirable to use ordinary TP telephone wires rather than coax cable because of the formers' ease of installation and lower cost per foot.
But these unshielded TP wires act as an antenna and are susceptible to external radio frequency (RF) energy. This RF noise can swamp a signal carried by the TP wires and thus they provide very poor signal-to-noise (S/N) ratios. Particularly, when long distances such as 300 feet are involved, as would be typical of a LAN.
S/N ratios can be improved by using very high signal transmission power levels, but FCC regulations specify maximum tansmission levels and high power tansmission is costly. A better solution is to provide a totally differential balanced receiver and to filter at transmission to fall within the FCC regulations, and filter at receiver which then eliminates bulk of external RF noise susceptibility.
The use of unshielded TP wires still msut overcome crosstalk noise. For instance, in a typical installation, a 25-pair bundle of wires may be used. Since these 25 pairs are in close proximity to each other, crosstalk noise can be substantial. This leads again to poor S/N ratios.